NASCAR Championship 2021

 

I mentally wrote this in the shower a couple of days after the race.  I can only hope it turns out as well on the page, as it did in my head.  (And if only I’d started writing this then, instead of a week later.) 

 

This is not going to be coverage of the race in Phoenix.  There was some drama and strategy, but it was four guys racing each other in heavy traffic.  It wasn’t a real NASCAR race.  It was a contrived TV event involving NASCAR that was less legitimate than the two exhibition races held during the season.  At least all of the participants in those races were trying to win. 

 

Don’t get me wrong.  The four guys racing for the championship were really racing each other.  This wasn’t pro-wrestling or the NFL.  There was no predetermined outcome.  Lest you think I’m just bitter about the outcome, far from it.  Myself and, from what I heard, many other fans were going to seriously question any champion being crowned other than Kyle Larson.  He had more wins than the other Chase drivers combined.  Chase Elliot is my driver.  I wouldn’t have been unhappy if he had won, but I’m pretty sure Chase would have admitted it was Kyle’s season.  Everyone else was just watching him win.

 

There was even some delightful glee in watching Larson win.  He was so grateful and overwhelmed by the moment.  By contrast, if Denny Hamlin had won, he would have thrown down his helmet and grabbed the trophy saying, “Gimme that!  I totally deserve this!” and then grabbed the microphone and would have proceeded to harangue the fans, “You all suck!”  I can somewhat understand Denny going after the fans who were booing him right after he’d been crashed out of the Martinsville race, but continuing to do it in a press conference afterward was just stupid.

 

Back to Larson, here’s the guy who lost his ride last year because he forgot that, while he’s ethnic, he’s not black.  The incident even stripped him of his minority status.  (So much for having grandparents that got sent to a Japanese internment camp.)  Meanwhile, the guy that he had to personally apologize to and beg his forgiveness before starting a cross-country groveling tour, Bubba “Noose” Wallace, was the first car that crashed out of the Phoenix race.

 

Heh, heh, heh.  Ahem.  Pardon me.    

 

That Toyota commercial with Noose always makes me snicker, too.  There he is inspiring a young black girl to be a racer.  Then she finds out about his white girlfriend and suddenly hates him and loses all of her self-esteem (probably becomes a lesbian).  Noose wasn’t even the first black driver to win a NASCAR race.  That was Wendell Scott in 1963.  You think he might have been able to tell Bubba the difference between a noose and a door pull?  (I’d read about Scott a while back, but had shamefully forgotten about him.  Leave it to an F1 broadcast mentioning him last month to remind me.)  

 

Cheapshots aside, what I’m getting around to here is yet another criticism of the Chase format.  Sigh.  I’m getting exhausted on this topic.  I’ve written on this subject a few times.  It’s not even worth linking to them.  Nonetheless, even though the Chase did reach the correct result this year, I’m still going to complain about it because it could have just as easily gotten it wrong given the format. 

 

I’ll more-or-less summarize.  Other sports have playoffs.  Racing series don’t, except for NASCAR.  In the other sports, teams that aren’t in the playoffs, stop playing.  In the NASCAR Chase, all of the teams are still racing.  Imagine during the day of the Superbowl there were 15 other NFL games going on.  (I wish I hadn’t wrote that.  They might try it now.  Given that most NFL fans are degenerate gamblers, they’d love that arrangement.) 

 

Theoretically, any of the NASCAR teams could win a Chase race, even those outside of the Chase (right, Noose?).  Since winning races is nearly integral to advancing and winning the championship, this is something of a problem (right, Denny?).  This leads to what we’re now getting at the championship race.  I’m sure NASCAR doesn’t officially tell the non-Chase drivers, “Thou shalt not pass.”  I’m sure the Chase drivers don’t threaten revenge on anyone interfering with their race.  Oops, that pretty much happened (ahem, Denny).  Yeah, on the other hand, what do they say about baseball and the “unwritten rules?”  We don’t have to tell you to pull over; we think you can figure that out for yourselves . . . Or else.

 

So, NASCAR functionally holds 35 points-paying races, and a championship race where four drivers race and the rest of the field run homage laps to them.  Just from a fan entertainment standpoint, this years’ race was agonizing to watch.  The commentators breathlessly commented exclusively on the four Chase drivers, while nervously wringing their hands about the other drivers possibly getting in their way.  This is nothing new of course for a championship race, but if the other drivers are only a distraction, why are they there? 

 

It really has gotten worse.  Last year, I was thrilled when Chase Elliot won the championship race.  He did, however, start in the rear and easily caught up to the other Chase drivers, who were all conveniently up front.  They also finished that way, with a retiring Jimmie Johnson finishing right behind them.  What were the odds?  This came close to happening again this year with only Chase falling out of the top four. 

 

I’m not accusing NASCAR of fixing races or the championship.  (They’re hardly the NFL.)  The four Chase drivers are legitimately trying to beat each other, and NASCAR is not interfering with them.  What NASCAR is doing is setting up this sham format for a championship and making the race something of a joke.  Everyone watching at this point knows this. 

 

This Chase has been going on long enough that fans just accept it as tradition now (sort of).  I’m not a historian, but let’s examine this tradition.  At the near high of NASCAR’s newfound popularity as a national sport in 2003, Matt Kenseth won the championship having only won one race that year.  By contrast, Ryan Newman won eight races that season and did not come close to winning the championship.  (In fairness, he also had seven DNF’s.) 

 

Kenseth didn’t not win races and still win a championship by accident.  It was a calculated strategy.  He gamed the system in place well.  Benny Parsons won the championship in 1973 with one race win, so it had been done before, but was hardly a trend.  There was some luck involved in those runs, obviously, but NASCAR was terrified at the thought of their top drivers all just points racing with the same strategy.  Something had to be done.  Thus the Chase was born: win and you’re in. 

 

In 2014 the Chase format changed to the final four.  The top four drivers in the Chase would race each other in the final race and the highest finisher would win the championship.  Ryan Newman was ironically in the first final four with zero wins in the first year of the format change.  I was really rooting him on.  It would have been too perfect: the system designed to reward winning producing a winless championship.

 

The main problem with the Chase, as far as most fans were concerned, was that Jimmie Johnson kept winning them.  (Not me, I like Jimmie.)  In response, they kept screwing with the format by adding drivers and changing the points system over and over again.  This eventually led to Stage Racing.  G**d***it!  At this point, I had no f***ing idea how NASCAR’s “playoff” worked and neither did anyone else.  Win and you’re in and advance in the Chase based on points accumulation according to NASCAR’s quadratic equation. 

 

Kevin Harvick won nine races last season, by far more than any other driver.  He was not even part of the final four.  (He certainly turned out to be a complete d*ck this season.  Screw him.)  “Well, you have win when it counts,” said the network commentators.  “That makes nothing but sense,” said Denny Hamlin, who proceeded to not win during the regular season this year and nearly won the regular season championship.  He won twice during the Chase and made it to the final four. 

 

Hamlin’s approach was a calculated strategy and a repeatable one.  If he’d won the championship over Larson, I’m willing to bet NASCAR would have made swift changes to the Chase again.  Maybe I shouldn’t have been rooting against him.  I’m sure whatever changes they made would have had additional unforeseen consequences.  There’s no “perfecting” this gimmick system as long as it ends with the final four race. 

 

The original NASCAR points system rewarded consistency.  Winning really didn’t matter as much as just making sure you didn’t finish badly.  Accumulate the most points by the end of the season and you win.  The Chase format rewards regular season race winners with a ticket to the playoffs.  This lets drivers with fluke wins into the championship and doesn’t really reward drivers with more than one win.  In the Chase, your accumulated points from Stage wins and playoff wins and points can add up to get you into the final four.  There, you have to finish ahead of the other three Chasers to win the championship.  It’s too damn complicated.  That’s all there is to it. 

 

What would I do?  Discard the Chase.  Make winning a race worth twice as many points as coming in second.  Award no points for finishing below twentieth.  This should keep things interesting, but no guarantees.  It depends on how much you want wins to count towards a championship.  NASCAR wanted drivers to take winning more seriously with the Chase format, but didn’t really go all the way with it.  They’re not properly rewarding winning or consistency with their current system.

 

Realistically, they’re going to keep the Chase no matter what.  They think they’re competing with the NFL with it.  How would I fix it?  I can’t.  At best, I’d get rid of the “win and you’re in” ethos and make entry into the Chase point-based.  Then, you could do elimination stages with wins giving drivers an automatic advance.  Lastly, since the final race is a gimmick anyway, it should be at a more interesting venue like Talladega or Daytona (which might kill the announcers given the hysteria they reached calling the race at a sedate track like Phoenix), or Bristol on dirt, or a road course (there I go pimping for Chase Elliot, but given the number of road courses NASCAR added to the schedule, they seem to be too).

 

Okay, we’re done here.  I expect none of this to be implemented, no matter how much it needs to be.